Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ on HBO Max, a Visionary, Action-Rich ‘Fury Road’ Prequel

Sand: It’s coarse and rough just like life in the barren Wasteland, where Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), the new vision from nutso director George Miller. Of course you know it’s the prequel to one of the greatest movies of the modern era, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, a two-hour vehicular rumble through the desert that grabbed our skulls and yanked, ripping our spines out and devouring them whole, with little dribbles of gut juice running down its grinning chin. Like I said, GREAT movie. By many accounts an all-timer. It was a goodly hit, earning Oscar nods and wins, as well as a un-put-downable book chronicling its excessively tortured making (Kyle Buchanan’s must-read Blood, Sweat and Chrome). So how do you follow up a movie like that? Easy answer: You shouldn’t, but no one ever said Miller doesn’t have several screws loose. So here we are, nine years hence, basking in the origin story of Furiosa, the tough-as-hell protagonist from Fury Road originally played by Charlize Theron, and whose dusty boots are now filled by the profoundly capable Anya Taylor-Joy. How can it not be amazing? (Besides at the box office, I mean, where it grossed a curiously disappointing $168 million worldwide so far.) I will say it’s absolutely very, very good, and considering the context, that’s just about all we can ask for.

FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Green Place: Here it is. Finally! We heard so much about it in the last movie. Furiosa just went on and on and on and on about it, stopping just shy of making us sit politely (but impatiently) while she showed us all her favorite photos on her phone. Except now, Furiosa is maybe 10 years old, and played by Alyla Browne. She reaches for a plump, ripe peach and plucks it from a tree, something that surely happens regularly in this little Edenesque oasis in the otherwise godawful hellscape of an ugly arid itchy scorched hellscape of a post-apocalyptic Australian desert. But shhh! The Green Place is a secret, and its peaceful and benevolent denizens will do anything to keep it that way. Which means, of course, this being a violent movie and all, that that secret is about to be threatened – namely, by some leather-clad shitbirds on souped-up motocross bikes who snatch poor little Furiosa and zoom over and around the dunes to their chaotic encampment, she being the proof of the existence of an imminently plunderable, beautiful and resource-rich plot of real estate the likes of which their boss, un uber-bearded wackjob named Dementor (Chris Hemsworth), would like to know about. 

Not a spoiler: The secret remains a secret, but at a cost. Furiosa’s mother (Charlee Fraser), despite being a helluva shot with a sniper rifle, meets her end and fails to rescue her daughter. And so Furiosa becomes Dementor’s porcelain-doll possession, and maybe a substitute for the “little ones” he says he lost. He doesn’t get into the specifics of his personal horror, but it doesn’t take Freud to determine that it fuels his power-hungry bloviatory eye-bulging madness. He carries around the little teddy bear that belonged to them, and even entrusts Furiosa with it; Dementor keeps her in a little trailer-cage pulled by one of the goons in his legion of loony bikers. I pause here to note that Furiosa is furious, for sure, but only as furious as a child can be, which is not furious enough to escape the clutches of a lunatic. 

As lunatics inevitably are, Dementor is power-hungry. He ventures to a little joint you may recognize, the Citadel, and confronts a couple of ugly bastards you also may recognize, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his right-hand bloated bag of pus, the People Eater (John Howard). It doesn’t go well at first for Dementor, but he eventually conquers Joe’s allies at Gastown, prompting a truce and a business deal that leaves Furiosa under Joe’s “care.” She grows up at the Citadel, pretending to be male amongst Joe’s panda-faced War Boys, avoiding Joe’s mutant sons Rictus (Nathan Jones) and Scrotus (Josh Helman). She’s played by Anya Taylor-Joy now – finally, after like 40 percent of the movie – and partnering with Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) as he pilots the War Rig on treacherous cross-desert runs to Gastown and the Bullet Farm for supplies. How treacherous are those runs? Treacherous enough for Miller to stage his signature brain-exploding action sequences, that’s how. And all this time, Furiosa has kept an ember burning deep inside her, the scorching-hot coal of vengeance. Just imagine what she’s imagining she’ll do to Dementor for killing her mother and taking her away from her lovely home. IMAGINE IT.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Beyond the obvious comparison to 2024’s other sand-in-your-crevices sci-fi megaflick Dune: Part Two? Only the other Mad Maxes, because Miller stands alone in nurturing tone and style, and anyone even gesturing in the general direction of his throne should just give up now to make local used-car commercials. And so, thee definitive ranking of the Max movies so far:

5. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome – It’s better than you remember! Trust me! But it’s still the least of the bunch.

4. Mad Max – The OG is an action-movie landmark, and the beginning of a beeyootiful friendship among us, Miller and the art of film – but it inevitably pales a bit in the wake of the greatness that followed.

3. Furiosa – It has what it takes, in the words of Dementor, to “make it epic.” No question.

2. The Road Warrior (or Mad Max 2 for you Aussies) – This ripper is an all-timer of a smash-’em car-chase goosebump-raiser, and set the tone for no. 1 on this list.

1. Fury Road – There’s nothing like it. Before or since. Or likely ever.

Performance Worth Watching: Some don’t like Hemsworth’s gregarious performance as Dementor, who tends to be one of those indulgently speechifying egomaniac characters – but some also can be very wrong about that, because Hemsworth is colorful and entertaining as a foil to the movie’s many strong, silent types. What those somes are missing here: Dementor is a crazed philospher, and what he says is crucial to the worldbuilding and Furiosa’s character development, and therefore the film’s core themes; his spiel about the futility of revenge-seeking is strangely eloquent, and quite potent. As for Taylor-Joy, she’s magnetic and charismatic and absolutely, and curically, stirs our empathy, despite the nagging feeling that she’s ever-so-slightly underused. And special mention goes to Burke, who makes the most of his limited screen time as the only character in this hell-setting to offer Furiosa anything resembling kindness.

Memorable Dialogue: Dementus and his lickspittle Smeg (David Collins) are on the run from a rather persistent Furiosa:

Smeg: Who is that? 

Dementus: I don’t know – someone competent and excessively resentful!

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Again: Fury Road is a masterpiece. You just don’t follow it. Too fast. Too powerful. Too much under the hood. All those 40-barrel-carb thingamajigs and fuel-juicer whatsitses. You’ll just chase and chase and chase it. And that relentless, epic, brain-exploding two-hour desert chase is now a meta-metaphor for itself in the cinematic pantheon. Wisely, the chase isn’t the primary dramtic crux of Furiosa, at least in the literal sense – but its there in the subtext, as Furiosa loses things and wants them back and pursues it even though she’ll never get them. Her mother. Her childhood. Her innocence. She’ll have to settle for revenge, except her revengee, Dementor, wisely points out the futility of it. He knows it all too well. He loved and lost and clings to that teddy bear, and it made him insane. Will it drive Furiosa insane, too?

Couched in Furiosa and Dementor’s lives is a lesson about power, and how weilding it can inflict wounds that never heal. You wonder how a human soul can act in such a manner. You pull on that thread and you think about patterns of behavior and how the dominos fall and where the first one fell. You think about that original sin and if humanity can ever be redeemed. Maybe not. Very much most likely not. People like Dementor give up and let the darkness take them. People like Furiosa cling to that purpose and keep fighting – there’s nobility in that, and I’d argue that nobility forever fends off futility. Life, as the all-too-true cliche goes, isn’t about the destination but the journey, about who you are and what you do during it. It’s like something. Something familiar. A chase through the desert, perhaps, and if you’re doing it right, on machines that emit thunder. Life is a furious road. Life – life is the Fury Road.

You’ll note that most sci-fi or action films aren’t so densely woven and reinforced with ideas. That’s Mad Max, that’s Miller for you. His response to the narratively condensed Fury Road is to sprawl, across the timeline, across locations: a decade or so in scope, multiple key set pieces. We see the Bullet Farm and Gastown, which were blips in the distance in Fury Road. We get a reprise from the previous film in a War Rig chase, which ups the ante via assailaints on gliders and a secondary plot where Furiosa and Praetorian Jack forge a friendship with few words, almost purely through action. We get a riveting shootout that becomes a chase that becomes a vital forging of Furiosa’s image and persona. We get a righteous finale that cements the film thematically as myth and epic, and tightly links itself to Fury Road.

What more could we ask for? Some of us have griped about Miller’s expanded CGI use in Furiosa, following the what-the-hell how’d-he-do-that practical effects of its predecessor – but some of us are shortsighted. Real cars still crash and real stuntmen still bite it, and Miller uses CGI as a tool to expand his vision. (Read Blood, Sweat and Chrome to understand the nigh-impossible good fortune and sacrifice necessary to overcome its dangling-from-a-cliff-by-a-toenail challenges, and you’ll better comprehend how CGI is a likely compromise to make Furiosa possible in the first place.) The world he creates still feels real. It’s imaginative. It’s immersive. A portion of the movie lumbers by without much action, but it’s nevertheless fascinating in its art direction and its complex character dynamics. It’s as close to alive as fantastical movies ever get. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Gauge your expectations realistically, and you’ll love Furiosa for what it is: Singular visual storytelling.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.